Words Dept.: entry

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while but haven’t got round to it. Last week I stayed in Edinburgh overnight and was able to catch a couple of Fringe shows with a local Haggis-eating Irn Bru enthusiast by the name of Adrian. Really.

Firstly we saw Justin Moorhouse’s show, Justin Moorhouse’s Ever Decreasing Social Circle. It’s got elements of that slideshow comedy popularised by Dave Gorman, although this is more northern and foul-mouthed, with fewer slides. Essentially it’s about Moorhouse’s Facebook friends (See? Zeitgeisty) and his attempts to whittle several hundred hangers-on down to one true friend by way of questions such as “Do you hate Morrissey” and “Do you like motor sports?” (The answers to these are no and no if you want to be in Justin’s gang.) It’s all rather pleasantly done and gives Moorhouse a chance to hang a show around a coherent theme while entertainingly venting his spleen on a wide range of personal prejudices.

Subsequently, we managed to get tickets for a John Shuttleworth show. At five quid a pop we thought this was a bargain until we got to the venue and realised it was a test screening of Graham Fellows’ new Shuttleworth film, Southern Softies, with no actual live show attached.

Our initial thought as the comment cards were handed out was that Fellows should have been paying us a fiver to watch it. But we soon came round because, even in rough-cut form, Southern Softies is very funny indeed. It was especially charming to have a sandal-wearing Fellows bellowing stuff out from the back, such as “we need to sort out the sound on this bit”.

The film is a follow-up to It’s Nice Up North and follows Shuttleworth as he attempts to decipher whether southerners are “softer” than people from the north. The Sheffield-born “versatile singer/songwriter” starts his quest in the Channel Islands but ends up getting side-tracked by producer and neighbour Ken Worthington who vanishes early on. In the end, Shuttleworth doesn’t actually escape the Channel Islands and ends up financing the film via a series of local product placement agreements.

My favourite bits were where Shuttleworth goes for a walk at a country fair and ends up wandering through the middle of a marching band, a recurring joke about noddy-shots and a scene in which Shuttleworth takes to the stage to entertain some bemused hotel guests.

Fellows is putting the whole thing together himself and apparently wants to get it finished by next year. I’m not sure of when/how it will be released and I’m not sure if he was joking when he said the film has been selected for the Channel Islands Film Festival.